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Galgut, Brown and Tóibín make Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist
The shortlist for this year’s £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize has been revealed, featuring Booker Prize-winner Damon Galgut, Natasha Brown and Colm Tóibín.
Penguin Random House dominates the shortlist, with four books, but indies hold their own with titles from Bloodaxe, Faber and Granta. HarperCollins imprint Fourth Estate also has one book on the shortlist.
The Rathbones Folio Prize, known as the "writers’ prize", rewards the best work of literature of the year, regardless of form.
Galgut’s The Promise (Chatto & Windus) is shortlisted just a few months after scooping the Booker Prize, and takes readers to South Africa, charting the crash and burn of a white family with a failed promise to their Black maid. It is joined by Brown’s debut Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a novel about identity, class, and race.
Three-time Booker shortlistee, and previously Folio Prize shortlisted, writer Tóibín is on the list for The Magician (Viking), a biographical novel about war, family, secrets and the winds of change. Also in contention is Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room (Harvill Secker), a "heart-stopping" story of love, family, survival and betrayal, which follows a young bride in rural Punjab.
Philip Hoare is also recognised for Albert and the Whale (Fourth Estate) which explores the intersection between life, art and the sea through the life of Albrecht Dürer, alongside poet Selima Hill’s Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe), which brings together seven contrasting but complementary poem sequences relating different kinds of women’s relationships with men.
They are joined by Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Faber), a story of courage, quiet heroism, and hope set in Catholic Ireland, which is finally joined by Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta), a novel about the connection between a semi-estranged mother and daughter and the damage done over the course of a life.
Chair of judges Tessa Hadley said: "We’re so excited by our shortlist for the Rathbones Folio Prize this year. Our eight books were chosen from a fairly dazzling longlist of 20; the books under consideration are all nominated by writers, and so the quality of the work is very high. So many good books, prose fiction and poetry and non-fiction – so difficult to weigh one against another. We all brought certain passions to the table when we met. There were just a few books that had seized us from the first page and hadn’t let us down until the last, and then seemed even richer and larger on a second reading."
The winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize will be announced in a ceremony at the British Library on 23rd March.
